DOD, Peer Reviewed Alzheimer’s, Transforming Diagnosis Award

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The TDA is intended to improve diagnosis now. Proposed projects must build knowledge, capacity, and research to reduce important barriers to obtaining a diagnosis, meaningful disease monitoring, and accurate prognosis. Barriers could include but are not limited to cost, patient access and education, clinical implementation, relationship to clinical outcome measures, biomarker validation, diagnosis technologies, lack of longitudinal data to inform prediction/prognosis, health equity barriers including structural and social determinants of health, and more. The investigator must clearly attune their project to provide true benefit to the intended end user – the person with dementia and their families. Key elements of this mechanism are: • Near term applicability: To meet the intent of this mechanism, applications should be focused on addressing diagnosis now. Near term, for the FY23 PRARP TDA, means acceleration within three to five years, focusing on implementation to the community as soon as possible. • Person-focused research: For diagnostic/prognostic outcomes proposed by the research to be successful, those impacted by AD/ADRD need to buy into the approach. This means researchers should design their projects to focus on the people who need the outcomes most, and the best way to do this is to partner with those stakeholders. Therefore, the FY23 PRARP TDA requires all projects to include collaborative community partner approaches. For this mechanism, there is an expectation that the investigator will host a community meeting with a facilitated discussion, to occur within the first three quarters of the period of performance that will help inform the execution of the research. This meeting should involve the intended research population and their community. The intent of this meeting is to gather feedback and input that will inform the execution of the research, optimize and refine research questions and execution therefore as well as help inform the dissemination strategy of the research outcomes. • Prospective recruitment of study participants: To meet the intent of the mechanism, the TDA requires an element of prospective human subjects’ data collection. The proposed project should leverage existing resources where possible; however, the study must ensure the advances proposed by the project aims are representative and applicable to a diverse population. Consideration of equitable, diverse inclusion of the study populations and team is essential to ensuring AD/ADRD diagnostic or prognostic solutions are of benefit to all and is a high priority for the program.

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